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Police say UnitedHealthcare's CEO was likely killed with a ghost gun. What are they?
A no guns allowed sign is posted at the 54th Street entrance to the New York Hilton Midtown Hotel in New York, where Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was fatally shot last week.
Ted Shaffrey/AP
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Ted Shaffrey/AP
Luigi Mangione, the suspect charged in the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, was carrying a “ghost gun” at the time of his arrest, authorities said.
The 26-year-old was “in possession of a ghost gun that had the capability of firing a 9 millimeter round” when he was arrested in Altoona, Penn., on Monday, New York Police Department (NYPD) Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said at a press briefing.
The NYPD said the gun, which is “consistent with the weapon used in the murder,” may have been made on a 3D printer.
“I have no tolerance, nor should anyone, for one man using an illegal ghost gun to murder someone because he thinks his opinion matters most,” Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro said on Monday.
Ghost guns, also known as privately made firearms, are assembled by their owners, either from scratch or through weapon parts kits. They are not marked with serial numbers, making them easy for criminals to acquire and difficult, if not impossible, for law enforcement to trace.
The Department of Justice Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said in 2022 that within the previous five years, it was only able to successfully trace 0.98% of suspected “ghost guns” back to their individual purchaser.
Over the last decade, a growing number of ghost guns have been recovered from crime scenes across the U.S., worrying many authorities. They have been used in homicides, domestic violence, robberies, killings of law enforcement officers, mass shootings and school shootings, including one that wounded two kindergarteners at a Northern California religious school last week.
The advocacy organization Everytown for Gun Safety has called them “the fastest growing gun safety problem in the country.”
While it is legal in the U.S. to build a firearm for personal use, the Biden administration, as well as more than a dozen states, have tried with varying degrees of success to regulate ghost guns.
Here’s what to know.
How are ghost guns made?
There are several main methods for assembling a ghost gun, a process that gun control advocates say can take less than an hour and costs only a few hundred dollars.
One is to use a 3D printer — with the instruction manuals and videos easily available online — to create some or most of the parts from scratch.
People can also buy the necessary components online, either piece by piece or all together in what are called buy-build-shoot kits.
‘Buy-build-shoot kits are weapon parts kits that are essentially pre-manufactured, [disassembled], complete firearms (a firearm in a box),” the U.S. Department of Justice says.
It was legal for retailers to sell those kits without running background checks until 2022, when the Justice Department passed a rule aimed at curbing the growing use of ghost guns in crimes.
How prevalent are ghost guns?
Ghost guns seized in federal law enforcement actions are displayed at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives field office in California in 2022.
Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images
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Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images
Ghost guns have been around in the U.S. at least since the 1990s, but have proliferated over the last decade or so.
The ATF says it received approximately 45,000 reports of suspected ghost guns recovered by law enforcement in criminal investigations between January 2016 and December 2021. Of those investigations, 692 involved homicides or attempted homicides.
Data from the bureau shows the number of suspected ghost guns rising steadily each year over that period, from 1,758 in 2016 to 19,344 in 2021.
State- and city-specific data also sheds light on the growing prevalence of ghost guns in recent years.
California data released in October shows that 8,340 ghost guns were recovered in the state in 2023, compared to just three in 2013.
Philadelphia police recovered 575 ghost guns in 2022, reporting a 311% increase in their use since 2019. The NYPD reported that officers seized 463 ghost guns in 2022, up from 263 the previous year.
“They are extremely dangerous and we must do more on the federal level to clamp down on the availability of ghost guns,” New York City Mayor Eric Adams said at Monday’s briefing.
How are ghost guns regulated?
Private U.S. citizens are allowed to build guns for personal use under the Gun Control Act of 1968.
Even so, some state and federal authorities are taking steps to crack down on ghost guns.
Fifteen states have passed laws to regulate them, with many requiring serial numbers and background checks for component parts, and others — including New York — going a step further by requiring ghost guns to be reported to authorities.
In 2022, a Justice Department rule took effect that made weapons parts kits subject to the same regulations as traditional firearms, including requiring commercial sellers to become federally licensed, mark certain parts with serial numbers and run background checks on purchasers.
The rule also aims to regulate some of the ghost guns already in circulation, by requiring federally licensed dealers and gunsmiths to put serial numbers on any guns they take into inventory that don’t already have them, before selling them to another customer.
“If you commit a crime [with a] ghost gun, not only are state and local prosecutors going to come after you, but expect federal charges and federal prosecution as well,” President Biden said that year.
Kit manufacturers and sellers challenged the rule in court, arguing the ATF exceeded its authority. The U.S. Supreme Court allowed the rule to remain in place pending litigation and heard the case in October.
It has not yet made a decision, though NPR’s Nina Totenberg reported that the justices seemed inclined to side with the Biden administration.
Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg, the Food and Drug Administration’s top drug regulator, said she was fired from the agency Friday after she declined to resign.
She said she did not know who had ordered her firing or why, nor whether Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. knew of her fate. The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The departure reflected the upheaval at the F.D.A., days after the resignation of Dr. Marty Makary, the agency commissioner. Dr. Makary had become a lightning rod for critics of the agency’s decisions to reject applications for rare disease drugs and to delay a report meant to supply damaging evidence about the abortion drug mifepristone. He also spent months before his departure pushing back on the White House’s requests for him to approve more flavored vapes, the reason he ultimately cited for leaving.
Dr. Hoeg’s hiring had startled public health leaders who were familiar with her track record as a vaccine skeptic, and she played a leading role in some of the agency’s most divisive efforts during her tenure. She worked on a report that purportedly linked the deaths of children and young adults to Covid vaccines, a dossier the agency has not released publicly. She was also the co-author of a document describing Mr. Kennedy’s decision to pare the recommendations for 17 childhood vaccines down to 11.
But in an interview on Friday, Dr. Hoeg said she “stuck with the science.”
“I am incredibly proud of the work we were doing,” Dr. Hoeg said, adding, “I’m glad that we didn’t give in to any pressures to approve drugs when it wasn’t appropriate.”
As the director of the agency’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, she was a political appointee in a role that had been previously occupied by career officials. An epidemiologist who was trained in the United States and Denmark, she worked on efforts to analyze drug safety and on a panel to discuss the use of serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the most widely prescribed class of antidepressants, during pregnancy. She also worked on efforts to reduce animal testing and was the agency’s liaison to an influential vaccine committee.
She made sure that her teams approved drugs only when the risk-benefit balance was favorable, she said.
The firing worsens the leadership vacuum at the F.D.A. and other agencies, with temporary leaders filling the role of commissioner, food chief and the head of the biologics center, which oversees vaccines and gene therapies. The roles of surgeon general and director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are also unfilled.
The U.S. Supreme Court
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The U.S. Supreme Court refused Friday to allow Virginia to use a new congressional map that favored Democrats in all but one of the state’s U.S. House seats. The map was a key part of Democrats’ effort to counter the Republican redistricting wave set off by President Trump.
The new map was drawn by Democrats and approved by Virginia voters in an April referendum. But on May 8, the Supreme Court of Virginia in a 4-to-3 vote declared the referendum, and by extension the new map, null and void because lawmakers failed to follow the proper procedures to get the issue on the ballot, violating the state constitution.
Virginia Democrats and the state’s attorney general then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, seeking to put into effect the map approved by the voters, which yields four more likely Democratic congressional seats. In their emergency application, they argued the Virginia Supreme Court was “deeply mistaken” in its decision on “critical issues of federal law with profound practical importance to the Nation.” Further, they asserted the decision “overrode the will of the people” by ordering Virginia to “conduct its election with the congressional districts that the people rejected.”
Republican legislators countered that it would be improper for the U.S. Supreme Court to wade into a purely state law controversy — especially since the Democrats had not raised any federal claims in the lower court.
Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with Republicans without explanation leaving in place the state court ruling that voided the Democratic-friendly maps.
The court’s decision not to intervene was its latest in emergency requests for intervention on redistricting issues. In December, the high court OK’d Texas using a gerrymandered map that could help the GOP win five more seats in the U.S. House. In February, the court allowed California to use a voter-approved, Democratic-friendly map, adopted to offset Texas’s map. Then in March, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the redrawing of a New York map expected to flip a Republican congressional district Democratic.
And perhaps most importantly, in April, the high court ruled that a Louisiana congressional map was a racial gerrymander and must be redrawn. That decision immediately set off a flurry of redistricting efforts, particularly in the South, where Republican legislators immediately began redrawing congressional maps to eliminate long established majority Black and Hispanic districts.
An explosion and fire drew a large emergency response on Friday to a lumber mill in the Midcoast region of Maine, officials said.
The State Police and fire marshal’s investigators responded to Robbins Lumber in Searsmont, about 72 miles northeast of Portland, said Shannon Moss, a spokeswoman for the Maine Department of Public Safety.
Mike Larrivee, the director of the Waldo County Regional Communications Center, said the number of victims was unknown, cautioning that “the information we’re getting from the scene is very vague.”
“We’ve sent every resource in the county to that area, plus surrounding counties,” he said.
Footage from the scene shared by WABI-TV showed flames burning through the roof of a large structure as heavy, dark smoke billowed skyward.
The Associated Press reported that at least five people were injured, and that county officials were considering the incident a “mass casualty event.”
Catherine Robbins-Halsted, an owner and vice president at Robbins Lumber, told reporters at the scene that all of the company’s employees had been accounted for.
Gov. Janet T. Mills of Maine said on social media that she had been briefed on the situation and urged people to avoid the area.
“I ask Maine people to join me in keeping all those affected in their thoughts,” she said.
Representative Jared Golden, Democrat of Maine, said on social media that he was aware of the fire and explosion.
“As my team and I seek out more information, I am praying for the safety and well-being of first responders and everyone else on-site,” he said.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
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